2016: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence

In the software industry, 2016 was truly transformative year especially for the Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI is not a new concept which is something that companies and businesses has been trying to implement for many years. Almost every companies started with all new advancements of technology to standardize Artificial Intelligence and use it for good.

First, Google started the year with a major breakthrough in Artificial Intelligence. AlphaGo was the first AI system to beat master at the ancient strategy game Go and the company announced it was ready for an AI first world. In Google I/O event 2016 , they announced the voice-based helper Google Assistant, updates to its machine learning toolkit TensorFlow, and the release of the Natural Language API and Cloud Speech API throughout the year.

The year started with Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announcing his plan to build an artificially intelligent assistant to do everything from adjusting the temperature in his house to checking up on his baby girl. With an update in august that he was almost ready to show off his AI to the world. Later,Facebook announced it was beginning to focus on giving computers the ability to think, learn, plan and reason like humans.

In January, Microsoft company released deep learning solution, Computational Network Toolkit (CNTK), on GitHub. Recently, Microsoft announced an update to CNTK with new Python and C++ programming language functionalities, as well as reinforcement learning algorithm capabilities. In July, Microsoft also open-sourced its Minecraft AI testing platform to provide developers with a test bed for their AI research.

CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella said that ““We want to empower people with the tools of AI so they can build their own solutions”.

IBM, the company known for its cognitive system IBM Watson. The company started the year with the release of IBM Predictive Analytics. It provide a service allowing developers to build machine learning models. In October, the company announced the Watson Data Platform with Machine Learning, and a new AI Nanodegree program with Udacity at its World of Watson conference.

Last but not least, most of the companies and university’s researchers worked on Artificial Intelligence in 2016. NVIDIA began to develop AI software to accelerate cancer research. Carnegie Mellon University researchers announced explore machine learning as well as computer vision. Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Laboratory developed a technique to understand how and why AI machines make certain decisions.